In Salem, Massachusetts, graveyard caretaker Masson (David Hewlett) catches two grave robbers stealing valuables from a corpse. He holds them at gun point and forces them to hand over the stolen items while telling them that graveyards mark the start of human civilization and will signal its end when people stop respecting the dead. After the grave robbers leave, Masson continues to steal from the corpse by pulling out a gold tooth. He drops the tooth and, while searching for it in the coffin, is bitten by a rat.
Masson takes the items to Hans (Nabeel El Khafif), who mentions that lately Masson has been coming up short. Masson tells him that rats have been stealing valuables from the dead and are now throughout the entire cemetery. Hans tells Masson that he has one week to pay back his debt. Masson goes to see city morgue employee Dooley (Julian Richings) for tips on wealthy deceased slated for burial so as to steal their gold fillings. Dooley is bribed with drugs and allows Masson into the embalming room, where the last body is a wealthy shipping merchant with a mouth full of gold teeth. Masson goes insane trying to get them and Dooley convinces him to come back the next day to keep the coroner from asking questions and giving away the scheme. The deceased man's family arrives and Masson and Dooley spy as the widow designates that he should be buried with medals and his expensive sword from King George V.
After the funeral, Masson digs up the grave to find that the rats have taken the body. Fearing what Hans would do to him for failing to pay, Masson, who claims to suffer from claustrophobia, crawls in after the body. After crawling through, he is chased by a pack of rats that attack and bite him. Initially the rats are scared but then they return. Masson hears a growl in the tunnel, where he sees a giant hairless rat that approaches him and begins to sniff him. Masson shoots the giant rat but it claws him and begins to chase him through the tunnels until Masson falls into a tunnel and ends up on a pile of human bones.
Masson is thrilled when he finds valuable jewelry and the sword. He then realizes that he is inside a stone structure in front of an altar to a demonic entity, a place Masson calls "The Black Church." He sees a body with a beautiful gold pendant and tries to take it but the body comes to life and attacks Masson screaming, "Mine!" Masson escapes, with the zombie following behind him, into a tunnel where the giant rat is waiting at the other end. They fight and Masson is victorious. After the fight, Masson sees a light and crawls towards it, but it turns out to be a reflection from his lamp against a plate on a coffin lid. The rats attack Masson. Later, the grave robbers dig up the coffin and find Masson's body with the jewels, but rats crawl out of his mouth when they try to take the loot.
Tropes
- Affably Evil: For all his flaws and crimes, Masson in general seems to be a generally harmless man who's simply fallen on hard times and is desperately trying to pay his debts. Aside from grave-robbing, nothing he does is willfully malevolent. In fact, he generally tries to be very polite and friendly to everyone he interacts with, from the rival duo of graverobbers (whom he just scares off rather than literally killing off the competition) and Hans (who is working for the loan sharks he owes money to) to his rude prostitute neighbor and the widow of the man he intends to rob post-burial.
- Buried Alive: Masson suffers from claustrophobia and is terrified of this fate, and seems to believe that the mob will do precisely this to him if he doesn't pay his debts. Ironically, he ends up doing this to himself in a roundabout way while pursuing the treasure that could have saved him from the mob.
- Casting Gag: David Hewlett is once again a Karmic Butt-Monkey terrorized by animals.
- Chekhov's Gun: During his descent in the underground tunnels Masson gets poked in the eye by a root and in his blind anger, pulls on the root and causes the tunnel to collapse on him. Later, he's pinned by the Queen Rat and manages to kill her by pulling on a dangling root, dislodging a boulder that crushes the huge rodent to death. This is also subverted earlier when a wealthy widow mentions that her husband be buried with the priceless sabre gifted to him by George V. Masson finds the sword in a huge pit of human bones, and when cornered between a priest zombie and the giant Queen Rat, decides he'll go down fighting with the sword. However, the rat pounces on him and he immediately drops the sword.
- Cthulhumanoid: A statue of a humanoid being with a tentacled face, possibly Cthulhu himself, is found in the Black Church as an object of worship.
- Devoured by the Horde: At the end, Masson is swarmed by a horde of rats that eat him from the inside.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Masson owes money to a fishmonger named Hans who repeatedly mentions "employers" who are not happy with him, and while crawling through the rat tunnels beneath the cemetery, comes across a "Black Church" worshipping an eldritch god resembling Cthulhu who is heavily implied to be the corrupting force behind the corpse stealing rats, along with the zombified priest.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The zombified priest in the Black Church tears his upper body free at the waist and crawls after Masson, leaving his legs behind.
- Hope Spot: At the end of the episode Masson sees a light at the end of the tunnel and frantically crawls toward it, believing that it's sunlight and he has finally made it out of the labyrinth. It turns out to be a plaque reflecting the light of his torch inside an empty coffin, which he is now trapped in since the tunnel behind him collapsed... and then the rats start swarming into the coffin.
- Impoverished Patrician: Masson is implied to have been a wealthy man before his gambling addiction got away from him. While he lives in a tiny, run-down apartment next to prostitutes, some of his furniture is still quite expensive-looking.
- The Mob Boss Is Scarier: The loan sharks after Masson terrify him enough for him to beat his claustrophobia and descend into the narrow tunnels under the graveyard.
- Riddle for the Ages: What is up with the Temple with a zombie priest underneath the cemetery? How is the creature being worshipped involved with the strange rats? Is that why the mother rat is gigantic?
- Right Through the Wall: While he's engaging in some evening reading, Masson's neighbour and a Working Girl are banging in the next apartment with enough enthusiasm to make the wall shake.
- Robbing the Dead: Masson has taken to robbing valuables and gold teeth off the corpses from the graveyard he manages to pay off his gambling debts.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: Masson ends up running into a deformed, predatory rat larger than he is in the graveyard's tunnels.
- Shout-Out: The name on the tomb at the beginning is "Catherine Lewis Padgett", referencing Catherine L. Moore, the wife of Henry Kuttner (the author of the short story upon which the episode is based) as well as their shared pseudonym Lewis Padgett.
- Survival Mantra: Masson repeatedly quotes the passage he previously read from Paradise Lost as he climbs toward what he believes to be the light of the surface."Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light."
- Trauma Conga Line: Over the course of the story, Masson gets bitten by a rat, poked in the eye with a root, buried in a cave-in, accidentally shoots himself in the foot, gets clawed by a giant rat, falls down a deep shaft into a mass grave and gets his ear bitten off by a zombie. Finally, just when it looks like he's found his way out, he finds that he's crawled into a dead end to be devoured by rats.
- Wicked Cultured: Masson, the grave-robbing protagonist, has an impressive vocabulary and is shown reading and quoting from Paradise Lost. As mentioned above, he's an Impoverished Patrician, so he likely had a refined upbringing before losing his money.
- Villain Protagonist: A downplayed example. Masson is a career criminal with no empathy for anyone but himself, but he's limited himself to stealing from the dead who at least don't suffer from his actions and isn't actively out to harm other people. In fact, he generally tries to be friendly to everyone he interacts with (save, you know, the rats).
